Quite a number of athletes in the Beijing Winter Olympics have competed in both the winter and summer Games.
The snowboard legend, Shaun White, attempted to qualify for the skateboarding event at the recent 2020 Tokyo Olympics. He just finished his fifth Winter Olympics on Friday. 34-year-old British athlete Greg Rutherford claimed the long-jump gold at the London 2012 Summer Olympics and earned a spot the British bobsleigh squad. His teammate, bobsledder Francesco Friedrich, competed in track and field until the age of 16. Mica McNeill, the U.K.’s top bobsledder, partners with Welsh shot-put champion Adele Nicoll.
The most inspiring athlete is American great hurdler Lolo Jones. She was the favorite to win the 100-meter hurdles at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but tripped on the penultimate hurdle and lost the gold. The 39-year-old at one point was about to join the women’s bobsled event, but didn’t make the American team.
What about Chinese athletes? Cases of those competing at both the summer and winter Olympics are rare in China, but the country did draft a significant number of athletes for its budding winter sports scene at a massive scale.
In 2017, more than 20,000 Chinese track and field athletes, martial artists, gymnasts, dancers and acrobats participated in the selection of winter sports athletes.
Most of the 35 selected by foreign cross country ski coaches under the so-called “champion criteria” had never seen snow before. One of the older members, Chen Degen, was once a 5,000- and 10,000-meter runner.
Three Chinese “cross-field athletes” managed to qualify for ski jumping at the Beijing Games. Male skier Song Qiwu joined the Sichuan Provincial Track and Field Team at the age of 13, where he focused on the 400-meter hurdles. Peng Qingyue, born in 2004, was selected from the Yunnan Provincial Track and Field Team, while the 25-year-old “veteran” Dong Bing used to be a Nordic combined athlete. They will redefine ski jumping at the Beijing Winter Olympics.
In terms of winter Games, the most successful case of talent transfer is Geng Wenqiang, who won China’s first international skeleton championship. Geng, a long jumper since childhood, has a robust body and quick reflexes, necessary qualities to master the skeleton, known as “F1 on ice.”
Interestingly, most Chinese skeleton racers were previously sprinters and hurdlers. Yang Wenlong, the world’s first snowboarder to successfully land a backside quad cork 1980, used to be a martial artist.
Yang Wang is a sports commentator.
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